Humans are capable of two types of awareness. The first is physical awareness made possible by our sensory and nervous systems. For example, when a pin pricks our finger, we are physically aware of the pain. The second type of awareness is descriptive awareness that includes the ability to describe the prick. In other words, not only are we physically aware of the pain, but we also descriptively aware, using descriptive information to describe the prick as painful. Descriptions are meanings that arise from defined relations among symbols within a symbol-based computational system. Although current computational systems can process vast amounts of information, these systems have lacked the structures and operations that support self-awareness and other forms of descriptive awareness.